Category: Reflecting

Poverty Charges Interest

The ways having grown up in poverty affects your brain, even when you are no longer in poverty, often feels unreal. Decisions you inherited from other people affect how you interpret things, feel things, and perceive things for the rest of your life.

Like the feeling of fear when you see a truck from the water department rolling slowly down your street when you KNOW you paid your bill and you are sure they are not coming to your house.

The shame you feel in the pit of your stomach when the register is broken and your card is declined at the store and you know to the penny how much is in your account and you KNOW it isn’t your fault.

Then the shame you feel when you realize it declined when you are buying a bottle of wine and some nice cheese for a party at your house, and you wonder if people in line behind you, who see all of this, are judging you for what you are trying to buy. Because how dare you, poor person, enjoy things!

The panic you feel when you are getting low on food, even though you have money in the bank and live near the grocery store and you are in no danger whatsoever of going hungry or even being uncomfortable.

That you will, for the rest of your life, always prefer mushy green beans from a can instead of the much healthier frozen or fresh green beans, because that is what you grew up eating, and the frozen beans taste “weird” to you.

Having grown up poor means berating yourself for buying the good olive oil instead of the generic, even when you can afford it. It also means feeling a little guilty about buying olive oil in the first place.

And we won’t even talk about how hard it is to pay for butter instead of margarine.

The constant feeling that if there is money in your checking account, it is because you have a bill you have forgotten to pay.

Having grown up poor, you will often have a strong resistance to paying for quality. Yes, you know the more expensive, better quality item will last longer and is thus a better value. But you also know the comfort of paying $30 for a thing, instead of paying $65 and having $35 more dollars in the bank. Because there have been times in your life when you had a problem that $35 would solve.

Despite the reality being that you are no longer living in poverty, you feel relief when you automatically sort by price. You find yourself judging people who shop in stores you can afford, but don’t believe people “like you” shop in because in your head you are still the kid who got made fun of because he wore girls’ jeans to school. And for the rest of your life, despite your circumstances, you will always feel slightly uncomfortable, like you are wearing someone else’s clothes.

So instead of buying the more reliable car, you buy the cheaper one, which is less reliable and requires expensive repairs. Or you buy cheap clothes – almost certainly made from oppressive labor practices, which only drags others into being victimized by your experiences. Or your reluctance to pay for good, quality food leads to dental work, diabetes, or other health problems. Or you buy the cheaper technology, which isn’t exactly what you need, but close, so you are always just off, a little behind, a little less than what is needed.

Like the payments on your student loans, whose principle you paid off a decade ago but the payments resulting from the usurious interest rates continue to decimate your budget month after month, the after-effects of childhood poverty linger long after the original deprivation is gone.

Poverty charges interest.

Current Events

I really dislike blogging about current events. There are a number of reasons for this: One is that these posts take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours to write, and I don’t want to invest that effort in something that will have a short self-life. Another is that I don’t have the staff or resources to do it well, and with the exception of a very few subjects, I don’t have the knowledge. And that shallow sort of posting that would result just encourages hot-takes, which provokes much more heat than light, which is sorta the opposite of what I want to do.

As I write this, there is a news story that has the attention of a lot of people. A lot of people are commenting on it – all people who don’t know any of the participants, and largely are people who don’t share any major identities with the participants. And I have resisted saying anything of substance about it, and I have had some people message me and ask why.

So, I thought I would take this time to tell you a story.

On Sunday, June the 12th of 2016, I was at the beach. I had snagged a weekend away and had turned off my phone, and we were enjoying the small town of Carolina Beach, which was our happy place when we lived in North Carolina.

It had been a rough year, and we were thankful for the weekend away. That Saturday night, after a day at the beach, soaking up the sun, we ate at our favorite restaurant and I ate popcorn shrimp. It’s funny the things you remember.

The next morning we lounged around the hotel room, moving slowly. We went out for coffee and donuts and then headed towards Fort Fisher, to take the Ferry to Southport, a cute little marina town and home to perhaps a dozen antique shops and flea market operations. Once there, we intended to grab lunch before spending the afternoon antiquing before slowly edging ourselves toward the 3-hour drive home. It was a trip we had made many times.

We stopped at the Fort Fisher Park gift shop – I was looking for a particular gift for a friend, and I had seen something similar at the gift shop before, so I stopped there, to see if they still had it. They did not. Renee and I hit the bathroom before heading to the ferry, and when I was done, I went to the car to wait for her.

While I waited, I turned on my phone for the first time in nearly 36 hours. It was around noon, and I got a bunch of texts from friends – all of whom were LGBT. All of them mentioned a nightclub shooting.

It turned out the night before, a madman had shot up a nightclub in Orlando, deliberately targeting members of the LGBT community. He killed 49 people and wounded 53. I called Kelly, who was the assistant director at the LGBT Center in Raleigh at the time.

She was in tears.

That night they were planning a vigil in Raleigh. They wanted me to be there. Could I do it?

Yes. When Renee came back from the restroom, we changed plans, grabbed a quick bite, and headed home.

That night I sat in a parking lot, holding a candle and listening to Trans folx and Queer folx and Gay folx and Non-Binary folx cry and confess their fears, their anger, and their rage. I hunted out the folk I knew, hugged them and prayed with the ones who wanted it, and listened to the ones that didn’t.

The next day I wrote a post that went sorta viral, with a title like, 6 Things Straight Christian Folks Can Do In the Aftermath of the Pulse Shooting. It got lost in a site redesign, but it wasn’t brilliant. It did things like asked us to listen, to offer help as defined by the people who needed it, and to curate and amplify and prioritize the voices of people with less power than we had. It was the most shared thing I wrote that year.

Then on Tuesday, I got a call from the LGBT Center. They had a group of people who were grieving hard, and they wanted a clergy person to be there to help them process, and would I be willing to do that?

I reminded them that I was straight, and questioned if I was the right person to do it. They laughed and said yes, but that the Ven diagram of clergy folks and people they trusted pretty much only had me in the overlap.

So I said that of course I would.

That Thursday night, I sat in a room, surrounded by people who had been persecuted by people who looked a lot like me and had held exactly the same credentials I held, and together we talked about the things that scared us, and the things that gave us hope, and mostly, I just listened and held space. And after that was done, there was hugging and crying and for not the last time in my life, I felt honored that I got invited to sit with hurting people in the midst of their pain.

I don’t tell you that story to highlight my role. I wasn’t any sort of hero or star at all. But I did want to tell it to make a little room to talk about something else: How to use our platform.

Historically, only movie stars and politicians had platforms. But now, we all do. And the whole world is listening. Even people like my great-aunt, who has 222 Facebook friends and is a retired librarian, have a platform these days. I mean, imagine the length a retired librarian would have had to go in 1995 to get her message out to 222 people. Now, she need only hit enter on a post on Facebook.

So, since we all have an audience, I think we all have an obligation to use it wisely.

When something happens, I do a sort of internal algorithm. It starts with something like, am I more identified with the victim or the oppressor in this? When the Pulse nightclub shooting happened, the victims were largely Latinx and LGBT, neither an identity I hold. However, both of those identities have been persecuted by Straight Christian people, which ARE two identities I hold. So I identified, in this case, more closely with the oppressor.

Another question is, “What can I do?”. Where can I bring my gifts to bear? I can show up, in a way that doesn’t center me. I can ask the people affected how I can be helpful and then do that thing. I can use my assets (like a social media following) to speak to people who look like me and tell them what I had learned.

And the last thing I consider is, “What is mine to do?”. In that case, I made myself available, and then as I was asked, I showed up in ways they deemed helpful.

But I had, at that point, worked with and among the LGBT community in Raleigh for a decade. I had a deep well of trust built up. I didn’t just show up with my hot take on what they should do, or ought to feel, or how to move on. They didn’t need my words – they could speak for themselves. They needed my solidarity. So, based on trust acquired over a long period of relationship, they asked for what they needed. And I said yes.

So, that is how I handle contemporary events. I don’t do hot takes. I don’t rush to have a position on controversial issues. I don’t use my platform to incite anger. And I don’t ever want to tell people who have been harmed how they ought to feel, or what they ought to be doing.

Instead, I ask myself: Am I the victim or the oppressor? What can I do? What is mine to do? What needs to be said? Who needs to hear it? And, perhaps most importantly, am I the person who needs to be saying it?

Sometimes, that means I’m just amplifying minority reports and voices. And sometimes, it’s calling out people who look like me and asking them to do better. And sometimes, that looks like being silent.

DIY Guy

When I was in financial sales, my mentor was a man named Jerry.

Jerry was a dapper man, always in a sports coat and slacks. His shoes were immaculate and shiny. He went through the carwash every time he filled his gas tank. His image and appearance were very important to Jerry.

We would have lunch every Friday, and on one particular Friday, he said he had to go to his mechanics when he left the restaurant because he had an appointment to get new windshield wipers put on his car.

I told him that was ridiculous – that he shouldn’t spend money on something like that, because it would be so easy to just do it himself.

“Hugh,” he said. “You don’t understand. I want to always make enough money that I never have to do it myself. It’s not just that I don’t know how to do it myself – but that I never want to know how to do it myself.“

That would bother me to no end. There is no way I would drive somewhere and then pay someone to do something I could do myself in literally 5 minutes without getting dirty or even inconvenienced.

But if there are two kinds of people when it comes to Doing-It-Yourself, Jerry was one kind of person, and I am the other.

It’s not even that I particularly enjoy putting on windshield wipers. I just can’t imagine paying someone else to do it. I can’t even imagine asking someone else to do it.

A few years ago, it was late on a Saturday and I was outside, measuring the spot for the new potting bench when I realized the faucet on the patio was leaking. Not a huge leak, but a pinhole of spray.

At first, I just thought the hose was loose, but then saw it was coming from behind the faucet. I got out my monkey wrench and when I turned the faucet to tighten it, the pipe broke off under the house. It was a 70-year-old galvanized pipe, and it had finally rusted through.

At the time I didn’t know where the water cut-off for the house was. Since it was gushing all over the patio and not in the house, I decided to let it spray while I figured out how to fix it.

I crawled under the house with a flashlight and saw the broken pipe was 1/2 inch galvanized pipe and what I needed was most likely a 10-inch nipple. Then I went to Home Depot – water still spraying all over the patio.

30 minutes later, I have a new faucet, a 12-inch nipple (just to be safe), and some plumbers tape, because while I own at least 10 rolls of plumber’s tape, I can never find it when I need it.

I crawl back under the house, holding a flashlight in my mouth, and disconnect the nipple, causing water to no longer spray all over the patio, but now to gush under the house and all over me.

It was then that I noticed the corner where the pipe is had, in the past, been some raccoon’s litter box, as now raccoon turds are floating in the water that is rising all around me.

Lovely.

I get the old pipe loose, and when I knock it out, loose mortar in the brick wall falls into the hole through the wall, keeping me from putting the new nipple in. Back out from under the house I go.

Back on the patio, I take a hammer and the old nipple and bust the offending mortar lose, and then crawl back into the raccoon-turd-filled swimming pool that is my crawlspace. This time I wrap the nipple with plumber’s tape, slide it through the wall, and with my monkey wrench, get it installed and tight. Water is no longer gushing under the house – it is now back to gushing all over the patio.

Then I crawl out of the raccoon septic tank, drenched to the bone and trying hard not to think about what germs are all over me, and then wrap the nipple that is jutting 2 and a half inches proud of the foundation wall (it turns out it WAS a 10-inch nipple after all, but I figured it was better to be proud than to be short) with pipe tape, and then put on the faucet, with water spraying everywhere, including all over me. Then it’s finished, and I turn off the faucet and everything is mercifully quiet again, except for the water dripping off everything, including me.

Elapsed time: 1 hour and 15 minutes. I paid less than $15 in materials. It was on a Saturday night, so it would have been an emergency plumber call at $175 an hour if I had been able to get one at all. 

I had never replaced a faucet before that day. I had a vague idea of how the plumbing works, and maybe $30 worth of tools. The biggest thing I had going for me was being willing to do it. Or, put another way, I had an orientation or a bent toward doing it myself. I honestly never considered calling a plumber.

On some days – like that one – it saves me a lot of money to do things myself. But sometimes, it really doesn’t.

Like right now, I’m in the middle of changing platforms for one of the newsletters I publish each week. I am not a coder. Or a programmer. I’m just a slightly above-average user of this sort of technology.

When I began blogging back in 2003, I taught myself HTML. And then rudimentary CSS, and learned how to do some basic work with databases and then PHP. Not because I really wanted to know how to do it, but because I couldn’t imagine having to ask someone else to change a picture for me on a website, or to tweak the font or increase the padding on an image. I couldn’t imagine asking for that sort of help even if I could have afforded it.

And along the way, I learned how to do lots of stuff, and for sure saved a lot of money.

But, as I said, right now I’m changing platforms. And the new CMS I’m using is one I’ve never used before. Like, it works entirely different than any CMS I had used before. But, I said, I can learn how to do this!

I then spent some 30 hours trying to figure out how to do it. I have been tied up for over a month – off and on – trying to work out a solution that was within my technical abilities. Have watched a dozen tutorials.

Yesterday I broke down and just paid someone to do it for me. They charged me $95, and now it’s done.

It frustrates me beyond belief that should it break, or I do something wrong and somehow screw up a setting, I will not be able to fix it, and will have to pay someone else to do it. I feel stupid because I couldn’t do it because I have all the tools to do it – just not the knowledge.

But sometimes, it just makes sense to pay someone else. It is hardly the best use of my time to learn a whole new type of niche tech that only does this one sort of thing that literally nobody else I know will ever use. That is very different from learning how, say, WordPress works, which powers ⅓ of the public websites on the internet.

It still bothered me more to spend that $95 than I care to admit. But that’s just the sort of person I am, I guess.

Streams of Consciousness

I’m sitting at my desk, after supper, with Leonard Cohen playing on the Amazon SpyBot, and I’m wondering what in the hell to write about today. I’m tired, and not feeling it, but I believe in magic, so let’s just do some stream of consciousness and see what happens, shall we?

I normally have my post finished by now – I have a number of stubs and half-finished posts in my hard drive, but after looking over them today, nothing strikes a chord. I will finish all of them eventually, but none of them excite me right now, and I try not to force it. When it comes, it comes, and while I can fake it if I have to, I don’t have to right now.

We had creamed chicken over biscuits tonight for supper, and one day I will tell you about that, how to make it, and why I always think about Dad whenever I make it. But I don’t really have the energy for that tonight, either. It’s good, though, and you will like both the story and the recipe. But that can wait for another day.

I’ve had a wonderful week this week, both at work and at home – a week filled with delightful walks in my neighborhood, pleasant talks with several of my neighbors, who bless us tremendously with their presence, and getting to have an impact on moving my state closer to a more just place for all of us to live. Of all the places I have ever lived, I love this state so much. It’s not better than any other place, but it’s a really good place, and we love it so. 

We have good neighbors, by and large, who have lots of kids who are always happy to see me. I think I’m destined to be the kindly old guy in the neighborhood that always has hard candy in his pocket. I feel like I’ve been training for this my whole life. People give directions to each other based on our house non-ironically: “It’s the third house on the right past the house with the swing and the giant chicken.”

My new bicycle does nothing to disabuse the neighbors and their kids of my eccentricity – if anything, it enhances it. I intend to get a bulb horn to honk at the kids as I go by. I feel like I probably ought to develop one of several stories I have in-process about being a good neighbor and having good neighbors, but the problem is that I can put everything I know about having good neighbors on a post-it note: Be kind. Stay in your lane. And expect to be a good neighbor first. Hard to flesh that out into 800 words.

The world is opening back up, which excites me and terrifies me all at the same time. I have a lot of thoughts about that, but I’m feeling pretty good right now, in my post supper fullness, watching the sun go down behind the trees across the street, listening to Leonard sing about how he hated to see another tired man lay down his hand like he was giving up the holy game of poker, while the highway curls away, and I realize that to write about any of that will surely ruin my mood.

And then I remember that today is the anniversary of that day, long ago, when a faith community that knew me and loved me anyway recognized my gifts and formalized their recognition of those gifts by ordaining me. I am always convinced I am the most unlikely of ministers, but I have managed to carve out a spot for myself in that world, being the sort of pastor who can be heard by people who really don’t like pastors. Sometimes, I wish other pastors were as grateful for me as the people who don’t trust them are, but if I have to choose, I’m confident I made the right choice. But I don’t really want to talk about faith much these days – especially on the internet, where we really only generate heat and not light. Sermons are, in my opinion, better seen than heard, anyway.

Leonard just told me that there ain’t no cure for love, and I think he may be trolling me at this point.

So, tonight I am just sitting here, typing instead of writing, and feeling tremendously grateful, and a little afraid – the way I always am a little when I don’t have words – and hopeful and tired, but the good kind, that comes from being poured out and used up and not the bad kind that comes from watching your soul being burned out, leaving only husks behind.

I have known that, too, and am glad this is not that.

But mostly, I’m proud to be sitting in my office surrounded by books and music, with a full belly and a clear conscience, with the tools to express myself, if not the desire, and I look longingly at the new books that arrived today and know that what I want most right now is to brew myself a cup of tea and to turn this thing off and to curl up in the armchair and slip gently into that world which exists only between the covers of books.

Goodnight, friends. I wish you every good thing. 

Transition Rituals

A while back I wrote a post that was almost entirely a list of things you could do to take better care of yourself, especially if you were in a helping profession. Two of the items on that list involved transition rituals.

A transition ritual is when you change state or context – like, going from work to not work – and you have some way to mark the occasion, to tell your brain that the transition has happened. I would argue these are always important, but if you are neuro-atypical – such as you, like me, have ADHD – they are vital.

Because while neurotypical people may be able to zip in and out of states and contexts, multi-tasking to beat the band, those of us who are neuro-atypical assuredly cannot.

For example – if you stop by your local every day on the way home and grab a beer – that’s a transition ritual. There are healthier ones, for sure, but it’s a ritual all the same. When I used to work in an office, I would pull up in the driveway of my house and walk around my yard, checking out the flowers and looking to see what was in bloom before I went into the house after getting home from work. It was a way to tell my brain I was home.

These days I work a lot from home (I mean, don’t we all?), and so it’s harder to demarcate what’s home and what’s work. So a thing I will often do is go for a walk around my block when I’m done for the day, as a way to tell myself I’m “walking home.”

But there are other transitions that have rituals, too. In the morning, I make myself coffee with a reverence that approaches that of the Japanese Tea Ceremony. When I go into my workshop to work, I always spend the first 10 minutes or so straightening up and sharpening the tools I will use that day. At night, I turn my phone to do not disturb before I put it on the charger.

When I sit at my desk in the morning, I open my upper right-hand desk drawer, take out the Mead 80 Page Composition Notebook that lives there, uncap my Pilot Metropolitan rollerball pen, turn off the monitor on my computer so I won’t be distracted, and set my cup of coffee on the upper right-hand side of my blotter. Then I’m ready to write my Daily Pages.

Lots of transition rituals. I’m not alone in this. David Sedaris once said something to the effect that he always goes swimming while on the road for his speaking engagements, not because he likes to swim, but because he likes the rituals involved in getting ready to swim and after he has swum.

These sorts of rituals may sound fussy, but especially for those of us who are not neurotypical, they can be lifesaving. Because for folks like us, transitions can be hard. A disadvantage of hyperfocus we ADHD folks have is that pulling us out of that zone can be incredibly disorienting and can feel almost violent at times. So, I have found that having distinct rituals to mark the transitions can be helpful in changing states or contexts.

The two solutions I have developed in my own life to deal with this are A) transition rituals and B) to state your needs. It often feels super-fussy to prioritize what you need to be your best self. But telling people what you need is a way to love them.

It also helps people love me better, because when I tell them what I need (like, a soft landing when I walk into the office, instead of being hit with a list of decisions I need to make when I walk into the door) they will absolutely get a better interaction with me, and whatever I bring to the table will be better thought out and more useful.

The Banality of Good

I believe it was Kierkegaard who said that life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forward. I could go look it up, but even if it wasn’t him, you know what whoever it was is getting at – we never understand the present nearly as well as we understand the past, because the past can be examined.

And examine it we do. In the current mess we live in, it seems every journalist, thought leader, guru, and pundit has a different opinion about how we got here. If we took away all the posts that blame others for where we are, would Facebook even be a viable business?

The past is written in stone, however, and will not change. While the past is useful for teaching us what went wrong, the future is written in sand, is infinitely malleable, and is where we should put most of our efforts.

How do we get there from here? How do we build the world as it is into the world as it could be? How do we change the future?

Having been in movement work for well more than a decade now, organizing poor people in the South, I have had the privilege of knowing some of the best activists and organizers in the US – some of whom are famous, but most of whom you have never heard of.

A while back, one of them – a woman who creates a place of refuge and safety for people without homes in a Midwestern town – and I were talking about a group that had just come through to tour her facility. The group was from an out-of-town church, and they had heard of her work and wanted to come to see the “radical” work this woman was doing.

She told me the group seemed happy when they left, but that while leading them around, she had felt a bit like a fraud.

“It doesn’t feel radical. It just feels like my life”.

I told her she was in good company – that Dorothy Day had felt the same way. In the postscript of Dorothy Day’s memoir, the Catholic activist and founder of the Catholic Worker movement describes how the movement came about, or at least, how it felt.

“We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, ‘We need bread.’ We could not say, ‘Go, be thou filled.’ If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread. We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded. We were just sitting there talking and someone said, ‘Let’s all go live on a farm.’ It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”

It all just happened. We were just sitting there, talking when it happened.

Of course, the truth is, the Catholic Worker did not just happen by accident. But it wasn’t the result of a grand plan, either. The reality is that it was the result of countless decisions. Ordinary decisions.

In her writings on the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “The banality of evil”. We want to believe, she argued, that massive evil is caused by external forces. Hitler was a psychopath, say, or that Eichman was mentally ill. But that isn’t true.

The reason massive evil happens is because of countless small compromises, countless small decisions that, on their own, are relatively benign and ordinary. Big evil is the result of little evil, quiet evil, banal evil done again and again and again.

I have come to believe the opposite is true as well. Goodness, Peace, Love, Harmony – whatever you want to call it, isn’t the result of grand sweeping gestures, but tiny micro-actions, repeated often. And that the banality of goodness, to coin a phrase, is the sort of thing Dorothy Day is describing in her postscript. Somebody said “We need bread” and so, instead of saying back, “Well, that sucks,” they went and got them some bread. And then they did it again, and again.

So, the good news in all of this is that if Goodness is brought about not by Saints, but by small decisions, then we all get to be involved. We all get to play a part in turning the world as it is into the world as it should be. And every little bit – our little bit – counts.

Secondhand Memories

Her name was Dorothy, and she had two sisters, Louise and Wilma. I was born on her birthday, and she loved me without reservation. Her life was a tragic one, the stuff of Southern Noir. She married for love twice, and both husbands would die tragic, unexpected deaths, both of them would leave her with a young child she had to raise alone, and both of them left her scant few resources with which to do it.

My father was her youngest son, and she died when I was four, and I only have two memories of her. The house she lived in was my grandfather’s house – he had moved her into it when they were married, in search of second chances, both of them having lost spouses and raised children on their own.

The house was old and drafty. It had been moved from its original moorings at some point in its past, using donkeys and greased poles, and so the doors no longer shut properly, and the windows may or may not open, depending upon whim and humidity. It had propane space heaters for heat, and in this memory, it was very cold, and early in the morning.

I was up before my parents and was walking around in my pajamas, looking for a grownup. I found her, wearing her housecoat, squatting flat-footed in front of the space heater in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette.

It was the cigarettes that killed her, of course, but slowly. She smoked because it was the 70s and of course she did. We brought a hospital bed into her living room, in front of the window so she could see what was going on, and so she would know who was coming to the house. That was where she spent her last days – watching the driveway, looking for company.

In this memory, she and I are laying on that hospital bed in the living room, in front of the window, and she was reading a book to me. The blanket was an animal print – I remember the cheetah and the lion and the giraffe – and she would tell me stories about each of them in turn. The pillow we lay on had a corner that had unraveled, and bits of foam rubber were poking from it. I don’t remember the book, but I remember feeling loved, and I remember her laugh that would end up in racking coughs.

That is really all I remember about her on my own. I have lots of stories filed in my head about her, but they are second-hand stories – stories dad told me, or her sisters told me when I was older, or that mom has told me recently since Dad died. Like I know her favorite flower was the orange daylily, but that is only because every summer, Dad would tell me that when the orange ditchlilies would bloom.

And she loved the music of Roy Orbison – especially Pretty Woman. But again, I know this secondhand, from hearing that fact relayed to me my entire childhood whenever it would come on the radio.

I was born on her birthday as a gift to her. Because of my size (10 pounds, 11 ounces) and Mom being tiny, I had to be born by cesarean, and so Mom got to pick the date. They picked Dorothy’s birthday. I’m told she loved this and was elated. But that’s second-hand, too.

Since we moved back to Mississippi a few years ago, I have planted lots of flowers. Shasta Daisy, yarrow, Asiatic lily, columbine, flags, and roses. So many roses. And daylilies. Lots of daylilies.

Including orange ditchlilies at the end of my driveway.

In a few months, it will be my birthday again. I will turn 50 this year, and were she still with us, she would be 111. Renee asked what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I told her I don’t have much planned. I will sit in front of my living room window, and listen to Roy Orbison, and read a book that makes me feel loved, and every so often I will gaze out the window toward the end of the driveway, looking for company, but not without also seeing the ditchlillies that always bloom on our birthday.

Use Your Words

There is a famous, but likely apocryphal story about James Joyce. The way the story goes, a friend asked how his writing was coming. Joyce, who was famous for his agonizing over the right word, replied that he was struggling, having only written 7 words that day.

The friend, trying to be upbeat, said, ‘Well, that’s not bad – especially for you!”

To this, Joyce sighed, and said, “I guess not – but I’m also not sure what order they go in.”

I never have trouble with words. But sometimes, I’m not sure what order they go in.

The other day, I was on a Zoom meeting with other organizers from around the state. They were talking about ways we can shape our messaging to be more effective in bringing people into the fold, and they highlighted some copy I had written for a website as an especially good example of what we were striving for.

Another organizer pointed out that I had authored it, and then said, “Hugh is good with words.”

I am, it’s true. I’m good with words. I think it’s because I respect them so much.

Words are sacred things – they allow us to pass on wisdom, to share culture and history, to give meaning and shape to our collective experience. Imagine if each generation had to invent fire, or the wheel, or paper for itself. Our words make civilization possible.

And so I take the words seriously. In the Abrahamic traditions, there is this idea that the Universe was created by words being spoken into the void by the Creator, where nothing existed but chaos until the words gave it shape and order.

But, as I said, sometimes I’m not sure what to say. Sometimes, I don’t have words.

Like when I went through a spell about five years ago when I lost six people that winter to drug overdoses. The streets were filled with laced heroin, and it was killing people left and right. You watch people who had struggled to get and stay clean have a relapse – which happens – but this time, the relapse was fatal.

Or the couple who had struggled for years and years to get pregnant, who had a perfect pregnancy, and who lost their baby 48 hours before their due date. I don’t know what you say about that.

Or the time my friend Nancy had struggled to get clean after a life of sex work and drug use and then did, only to have a brain aneurysm and die. Or my friend Jimmy, who fought for a decade to get housing, and did, and got hit by a car the day before we were to help him move in.

Sometimes, there are no words that make sense.

Or when you see that a million people have died in the US from a massive, two-year-long pandemic, and yet we don’t have the political will to have healthcare that works.

But I still believe in the power of words.

In 2020, my Dad died from COVID, and I’ve written a lot about it. But nearly 1 million people have died from COVID in the US over the last two years. My dad’s death, while tragic, isn’t unique. It’s devastatingly common. Almost pedestrian at this point.

Because those million deaths represent many millions of people, like me, who are impacted by those deaths. Everything I felt – millions of people have felt those emotions over the last few years.

On one hand, it would be easy to say that I don’t have anything special to add to this conversation. How conceited must I be to believe that any words I can come up with would have any impact on anyone?

But I don’t think that. I don’t think I’m special.

But I also believe that we don’t do a good job in our culture of talking about things that scare us, that frustrate us, that hurt us. I think we are all a little broken, a little damaged, and that we all spend a lot of time trying to pretend that we’re not. And so we are carrying a heavy facade around with us because we are afraid to use our words to talk about the ways in which we are broken, lest we admit our imperfections to others, who are also imperfect, and also trying to hide it.

And I believe that, as Fred Rogers said, anything human is mentionable, and anything we can mention can be made more manageable and that by talking about things, they seem smaller and less scary.

But to get there, we have to use our words.

Life Interrupted

The other day, I was thinking about how I have this persistent feeling of being behind. Not in my work, although that is also true, but behind in life. It’s like I am at least 10 years behind everyone. I am, right now, about to turn 50, but in terms of life markers, generally fit in closer to folks around the end of their 30s.

And then I realized it was that I didn’t really become “me” until I was in my early 30s, and I had this whole decade where I was floundering around, pretending to be something I’m not.

In my 20s, I was trying hard to run away from being a poor kid from Mississippi, and so I adopted an identity I thought would make me happy – I got a career I thought would make me enough money to wash away my blue-collar roots, a wife that would project the right sort of image, I went to the “right” church, made the “right” relationships.

But by my early 30s, the relationships, the career, the wife would all be gone, and I was adrift for a few years, and it was then that I began my second act and started to figure out what I had been meant to be all along.

But that’s a different story.

One of the things about having been married before is you have this whole other life that you were once part of. Places that were your favorite, inside jokes, routines, and friends. And when the marriage ends, a lot of that disappears.

We had some friends. They were a (hetero) couple, and the woman was a friend of a friend, but we both hit it off with her – Let’s call her Lacy – and then Lacy became our friend. She was in law school when we met her, but her daddy was a famous lawyer who helped her get a good job when she graduated. Lacy is a year older than I am, so she was perhaps 27 when we all met.

Eventually, she met a guy – let’s call him Fred – who was a little dorky, but sweet, and they dated and they were couple-friends with us. They ate in our house, we went to dinner with them on the regular, and we and their mutual friends all ran in the same circles and went to the same parties.

Lacy and Fred moved to another big city, the one where her father the famous attorney lived, and we stayed in touch the way one did in the early 2000s before social media, but then not long after that the divorce happened and I lost touch. I have not thought of either of them in years.

Recently, Lacy’s name just randomly popped into my head when I saw something that reminded me of something she once said. From curiosity, I looked for her on Facebook to see what she was up to.

She is still with Fred. He has a job where he wears a suit and looks very distinguished in a late-forties sort of way. She is still an attorney, but one who wears big hats and goes to fundraisers and throws derby parties.

It is as if they were the natural conclusion of what they were then. Like their life had gone on uninterrupted since 2001 or so, the last time we spoke, and meanwhile, mine has changed so completely as to be unrecognizable.

It made me wonder, pretty much for the first time in ages, what my life would have been like if I had remained a “financial professional”. Would I live in a McMansion? Would I now wear Italian suits and look distinguished in a late-forties sort of way? Would I have remained married? Would we have a condo in Destin? Would I vote Republican, and pride myself on being fiscally conservative but socially liberal (which means you think poor people need help but don’t think you should be the one to actually pay for it)? Drive a Lexus? Attend the big church that the “right” people went to? Would my wife “do lunch” with the ladies?

Because that is what I was headed for. It was all laid out for me as clear as the lines on a Rand McNally road map. I could have had that life.

Or, which is more likely, the drinking I developed as a coping mechanism to survive in a job that filled me with anxiety every day would have gotten worse, and I would have had an affair or two, and I would have lost the job and the car and the apartment and the marriage, self-imploding and ruining myself and everyone around me and I would live today in a half-way house somewhere if I was lucky, or be dead if I wasn’t.

But as St. John said, life is what happens while we are making other plans.

Back to my friend Lacy, the attorney: My life got interrupted. Hers did not. It was like looking at this bizarro look into an alternate reality that could have been mine except for maybe three or four decisions.

I considered friend requesting her on Facebook. After all, we were friends once. But what would we talk about? What did we have in common anymore? I wasn’t the person she once knew and hadn’t been for nearly 20 years.
 
In the end, I just closed the Facebook tab and went outside to sit on my porch and watch the sparrows play in the leaf pile. There are some answers you are just better off not knowing.

Imposter Syndrome

Once upon a time, I was considered a subject matter expert on issues surrounding homelessness.

I would lecture at universities. I’ve spoken to crowds of 10,000 people, taught police departments, consulted with denominations, and had waged war with a mid-sized city over homeless policy, and won.

There were articles about my work in Time magazine. The Christian Century. The Huffington Post. I had been interviewed on NPR Morning Edition. Al Jazeera. Fox News. My words had appeared in The Washington Post, as well as Ethics Daily and Sojourners, and other places I forget.

And I had years of front-line experience working with and among people experiencing homelessness. I’m not telling you any of this to impress you, but rather to impress upon you that when it came to issues around homelessness, I had ample evidence that I knew what I was talking about.

But none of that would stop the dream.

The dream was a recurring one that began to show up sometime in my sixth year of that work. I was getting invitations to write and speak at ever-larger events and platforms. I was invited that year to lecture at the NC Episcopalian Diocese Clergy Retreat. Basically, the then-Bishop of NC (who, incidentally, is now the Presiding Bishop of the whole freakin’ Episcopal Church) pulled every Episcopalian Priest in the state into a room and made them listen to me for three days.

Every person in that room knew more than I did about everything except homelessness. I am a very informal Mennonite, and they were all very formal and highly educated Episcopalians. They wouldn’t even let me be the guy who handed out their bulletins at the back of the church without some additional training.

The dreams began about six weeks before the retreat, and they still show up from time to time. The scene is always the same: The boardroom at the Episcopal Church across the street from the Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh, NC.

It’s a beautiful room – I’ve been in it many times – and there is dark furniture and a long polished table and book-lined walls and large windows and heavy paneled double doors. And in the dream, I am standing at one end of the table, on the end furthest from the doors, and all around the table are folks – men, women, Black, white – wearing clerical collars, and I’m presenting… something. Whatever it is, they are listening and taking notes, and it seems to be going well.

Suddenly, the door bursts open, and a silver-haired white man in full clerical regalia strides two steps into the room, points at me, and roars, “Get him out of here!”. Suddenly, the people who had been listening to me leap up and drag me out in the hall, and then they go back into the room and shut the door.

Subtle, huh?

That feeling – the one that says despite all the evidence that says you actually do know what you are doing, you still feel like you are in over your head, and surely someone will notice and point it out to the world? They call that imposter syndrome. And I don’t think it ever goes away. At least, it never has for me.

There is probably a lot of social conditioning that goes into this. I do happen to know many silver-haired white men who wear clerical garb, and they seldom seem to exhibit signs of imposter syndrome. We should all pray to have the confidence of a mediocre white man. Having grown up economically poor, I absolutely have unresolved issues around class and status that things like wealthy churches exacerbate.

When we show up, we bring more than ourselves with us. I bring generations of working-class stigma and prejudice into any room I show up in, and no amount of outside praise takes that away.

These days, I write. A lot. Around 30,000 words most months. I have thousands of newsletter and blog subscribers. People pay money to make sure I can keep doing that. In addition to my writing for the web, I’ve been published in magazines, newspapers, and in books. I’m pretty good at this.

And yet, the other day when a friend introduced me to someone as a writer, I found myself self-deprecating, minimizing, doing the Zoom-equivalent of kicking the ground and saying “aww shucks”.

“I have a little blog”, I told them. Gone were the newsletter subscribers. Gone were the publishing clips. Gone were the books, the newspaper articles. Gone were the 20 years of effort that led to any of this.

I have a little blog.

My friend corrected me, said I have an amazing blog, and that she reads it daily.

Imposter syndrome. I just couldn’t even let her call me a writer.

Despite the fact that I, you know, write. A lot. And pretty well. (I wasn’t going to put that last sentence, because it felt braggy. Imposter syndrome even here.)

I don’t know what you do about it, but I know I’m not the only one. I still have the dream, but less often now – probably because I’m dealing with fewer old white dudes in positions of power. But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten over it. Because I haven’t.

But I have gotten better at being willing to believe I’m wrong. That the evidence might be right. That I may actually be as good at something as other people say I am.

And that maybe I belong at that damned table after all.